I always like Gene Siskel but that this is an uninspired list. The kind of thing you might expect from someone who has just gotten out of Film Appreciation 101 and fancies themselves a film expert.

I'd like to see the reasoning behind some of those choices. The archives of the television show are pretty intact but I've never seen him articulate his views on all his favorite films. Siskel and Ebert are no doubt a huge deal responsible for why Citizen Kane has become this sacred cow.

This shows the auteurs preferred later, crappy Welles to his undoubted good film. "Mr. Arkadin" is a good example of that. They do the same thing for Hitchcock, Chaplin, Dreyer (ie. chose lesser films v. the real deal). Part of the 'I-am-more-avant-garde-than-thou' syndrome, or perhaps they are just better judges of French films, where their taste is more Catholic.

The Magnificent Ambersons is an interesting case. I'm no fan of Kane, as you all know, but Kane is twice the movie Ambersons is. Easily. Ambersons gets a lot of love and I'm not sure why. Holt is pretty bad (I think we've discussed the possibility that the role of Georgie is really, really difficult and generally sinks the actors who get stuck with it), for one thing. Welles would always claim that the movie would have been great if the studio hadn't hijacked it, but I find this rather difficult to believe because the problems are not that the structure is off necessarily, but that the tone is off. The most dramatic and gorgeous scene in the book is the one where Georgie tells his uncle that he's cut his mother off from her beau; it's a powerful, doom-laden scene of deep import and pathos. In the movie, Welles plays it with one of the characters taking a bath and overacting like Harvey Korman on steroids; he essentially plays the best dramatic scene in the story, and the most significant scene too, for laughs. It's the pivot point of the story and, if one is going to buy Georgie as a tragic figure, it has to happen in that scene, but that's damned near impossible the way Welles plays it and things like that kind of fundamental misunderstanding of the arc of the story have nothing to do with the studio and everything to do with Welles.

Welles might have been a very good Georgie; he has many of the same character traits, including a tendency to ultimately cut his nose off to spite his face. Ambersons is beautifully shot and Agnes Moorehead is extremely good (as always), but the rest of the movie is a dreadful misfire.

I think Welles might have intended to play Georgie as he aged--which is why Tim Holt was cast. He's a pocket version of Welles.

Re: the misfire element. There are great scenes in this film--usually involving Moorehead. But undoubtedly there is a problem. The swings in tone have a source in the book, which starts as a nostalgic comedy, and gradually becomes a socio-economic comment upon the Gilded
Age, with George symbolizing a form of American life that was passing, not always feliciously. Tarkington's genius is to make the anti-hero his symbol, while the supposedly good guy, Eugene Morgan represents the new heartless, status quo.

Welles himself was a Georgie as a child--with an overbearing mother, an ineffectual father, and a small-town background. I think this is what attracted him to this material, and perhaps one of the reasons he could not finish the film--he couldn't bring himself to accept its message. Vide also: Billy Wilder and "Ace in the Hole." That's a film about survivor's guilt, of which Wilder had quite a bit.

Sragow's 600+ page opus on Victor Fleming is one of the most thoroughly researched books on a filmmaker I have ever read, made all the more impressive by the fact Fleming died in 1949 and there's not much material of him "on the record." The background and detail Sragow came up with was extraordinary.

Sragow's list is pretty much what I would have expected. But it's weird to see the Wizard of Oz next to the Wild Bunch. Talk about a range of material.